Month: November 2010

Asra Nomani from The Daily Beast hits the nail on the head with one statement to CNN, which is that the current security situation is set up more to offend everyone equally than to actually catch terrorists. Nomani, herself a Muslim, advocates profiling as the basis of a rational security protocol that looks for the threat and uses resources for that purpose, rather than harassing women traveling with breast milk, as an example. We already profile in other security efforts, Nomani reminds us, such as the war on drugs, where Colombians get much more scrutiny as a matter of course. We also profile in the opposite direction in visa-waiver programs. Why not add profiling — a technique used in law enforcement for serial murders and rapes — as a tool to enhance airline security and end the waste of time and effort on TSA’s part?

What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

ACLU Applauds Portland City Council Ending Role in FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force

Money Quote from Video

“what it really points out… is that, on this Thanksgiving day weekend we can’t allow the ACLU to make terror policy in this country.”

April 28, 2005 – PORTLAND, OR Citing the need for greater oversight over its own police officers, the Portland City Council voted 4-1 in support of Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s revised resolution that will end Portland’s participation in the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Potter and FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Jordan have said the two agencies would continue to cooperate in terrorism investigations and that the Mayor will be seeking secret clearance to allow him access to some classified information.

The vote came after weeks of negotiations between the City and the Justice Department which failed to resolve the City’s concerns regarding police officer oversight. In a City of Portland proposed resolution, the mayor would have been given the necessary clearance to provide meaningful oversight of the officers who worked directly on the JTTF. At the U.S. Attorney and the Mayor’s request, ACLU representatives took part in discussions of the resolution….

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have injected themselves into the war on terror as never before, leaping to the defense of the man often described as the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula: Anwar Al-Awlaki. There’s little doubt that Al-Awlaki provided aid and inspiration to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underpants bomber,” and to the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. He has also called for the murder of civilians like Salman Rushdie and the young Seattle cartoonist who initiated “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Yet, despite the danger that Al-Awlaki continues to represent to the free world, the ACLU and the CCR filed suit in federal court to protect the radical cleric’s “rights.”

Al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser Al-Awlaki, asked the two groups for help after he learned that the Obama administration has targeted his son for assassination. Because the cleric was born in New Mexico, the ACLU and CCR maintain that he is entitled to due process in America’s legal system. Defending his organization’s decision to defend Al-Awlaki, Vincent Warren, the executive director of the CCR, said:

That’s what we do. We file lawsuits. …[W]e don’t believe the US should be wreaking violence for political reasons. It should be up to a court, not just the US government, to decide whether al-Awlaki poses a threat. The US should not be conducting the killing of US citizens outside the legal process, far away from any battlefield.

The proposition that the US is “wreaking violence for political reasons” is patently ludicrous. The United States is at war with a determined enemy and the fact that this particular conflict involves asymmetrical warfare does not relieve the president of the United States from his duties as commander in chief. Al-Awlaki isn’t “far away from any battlefield” because he and his fellow terrorists have defined the battlefield as the whole planet earth.

IBD Reports on a Federal Judges report and makes mention that “He refused requests to strike their names from the list.” Which tells me he was under pressure to xix these connections.

Islamofascism:Now that a federal judge has unsealed evidence showing the three most prominent Muslim groups in America support terror, Washington must cut all ties with them.

U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis has ruled there is “ample evidence” to support the Justice Department’s decision to blacklist the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as unindicted co-conspirators in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror trial.

He refused requests to strike their names from the list.

At the trial, which ended in guilty verdicts on all 108 counts, FBI agents testified that ISNA, NAIT and CAIR are fronts for the federally designated terrorist group Hamas, which has murdered countless Israelis and at least 17 Americans.

Indianapolis-based ISNA controls most of the Islamic centers and schools in the country through its NAIT subsidiary — a Saudi-funded trust that holds title to radical mosques, including the notorious 9/11 mosque in D.C. CAIR, headquartered within three blocks of the U.S. Capitol, is the nation’s largest Muslim-rights group. The trio for years have maintained they are “moderate” nonprofits that condemn terrorism.

However, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with Hamas,” Solis said in his 20-page ruling, written in July 2009 and unsealed just last Friday.

Solis noted that investigators have traced “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from ISNA and NAIT bank accounts to Hamas suicide bombers and their families in Gaza and the West Bank.

He said CAIR also took part “in a conspiracy to support Hamas.” Phone lists and other documents introduced by the government reveal CAIR and its founding chairman Omar Ahmad have operated as key members of Hamas’ U.S. wing, known as the “Palestine Committee,” according to the ruling.

FBI wiretaps and agent testimony also placed both Ahmad and CAIR’s acting executive director — Nihad Awad — at a secret meeting held last decade with Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

In a hotel room, participants hatched a scheme to disguise payments to Hamas suicide bombers and their families as charity. ISNA also was mentioned at the meeting.

You might ask, so what? Well, the radicals in this country aren’t the fringe; they represent the Muslim establishment.

Outrageously, these dangerous fronts, cloaked as they are in religious garb, still enjoy charitable tax status. The IRS exempts their funding, much of which comes from the Middle East.

Yet despite Mohamud’s avowedly Islamic motivations, the Imam Yosof Wanly of the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, followed a predictable and oft-repeated pattern when he downplayed Mohamud’s connection to the local Muslim community. Every jihadist who has ever lived for any time in the United States has been simultaneously a devout and informed Muslim by his own account, and by the account of the local mosque leaders, someone they seldom saw and who was at odds with the larger community when he did show up. It raises a large question that no journalist ever has the wit or courage to ask: if these jihad terrorists really had little or nothing to do with their local mosques, and if their understanding of Islam differs so sharply from that of the area Muslims, where did they learn the version of Islam that impelled them to attempt mass-murder of infidels?

In the course of various media interviews, however, Wanly did end up revealing that he had more of a relationship with Mohamud than he would be likely to have with a peripheral member of his congregation whom he seldom saw. He said that he and Mohamud had “average teacher-student” discussions, and characterized Mohamud, a dropout from Oregon State University, as, according to the Associated Press, “a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture.” Even though this statement seems calculated to give the picture of anything but a devout, observant, serious Muslim, it also shows that Wanly knew Mohamud better than one might expect a busy imam in a major city to know a sometime college student who attended his mosque only occasionally.

[….]

Former Classmates Input

Another of Mohamud’s former classmates remembered a fight the two had over a messy locker. “The main thing was, the way he said he hated Americans,” said Andy Stull. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life – ‘I hate Americans!'” (Jihad Watch)

V. The portrayal of Muslims as victims

Generally after a jihad attack in the United States, whether successful or not, mainstream media outlets run multiple stories about how Muslim communities fear a “backlash” against innocent Muslims from enraged “Islamophobic” rednecks. Of course, such “backlashes” never materialize, but the purpose of such stories is to shift the public’s attention away from the reality of Islamic jihad and onto the fiction of Muslims as victims, living in fear of vigilante attack in the United States. In reality, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for only eight percent of crimes thus classified in the U.S. in 2009, according to a recently released FBI report (see below). Blacks and Jews were far more likely to be victimized – and far less likely to be the subject of fawning media reports featuring hand-wringing over a “backlash” against them.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Blacks and Jews were the most likely victims of hate crimes driven by racial or religious intolerance in the United States last year, the FBI said Monday in an annual report.

Out of 6,604 hate crimes committed in the United States in 2009, some 4,000 were racially motivated and nearly 1,600 were driven by hatred for a particular religion, the FBI said.

Blacks made up around three-quarters of victims of the racially motivated hate crimes and Jews made up the same percentage of victims of anti-religious hate crimes, the report said.

Manufactured Victimhood

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have risen sharply in the U.S. since 9/11. In fact, the rate of such crimes has actually dropped, and as this new study shows, it is quite low compared to hate crimes against other groups. CAIR exaggerates the number and seriousness of hate crimes against Muslims because it knows that victimhood is big business: insofar as it can claim protected victim status for Muslims in the U.S., it can deflect unwanted scrutiny and any critical examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism. (Jihad Watch)

Anti-Muslim crimes were a distant second to crimes against Jews, making up just eight percent of the hate crimes driven by religious intolerance….

If he wasn’t really an Islamic jihadist, despite the testimony of his own words, then why did Mohamud try to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony? Wanly said that he had a difficult childhood after moving with his parents to the U.S. from Somalia when he was five years old. According to the New York Daily News, “neighbors say Mohamud was doted on by his family but embraced militant Islam not long after his parents split up. ‘He was a quiet kid, but with his folks splitting up, who knows?’ Adam Napier, who lived next door to Mohamed Osman Mohamud for years told the newspaper.”

Yes, who knows? The divorce of parents has driven many an unhappy child to try to set off a bomb in a crowded place and murder hundreds, if not thousands, of people, hasn’t it?

Of course, many more terrorist attacks have been committed by Islamic jihadists who read and took seriously the Qur’an’s commands to wage war against infidels than by children traumatized by their parents’ divorce, but never mind: when it comes to exonerating Islamic texts and teachings of any responsibility for motivating violent jihadists, government, law enforcement and media officials join Islamic spokesmen in grabbing hold of any alternative explanation, no matter how implausible.

In the following video you will see how this last section (#IV) is mentioned next to how Oregon rejected FBI and multi-city help to its law enforcement. Thank Fox & Friends for this nugget:

The Somali-born teenager who was arrested in a sting operation while trying to blow up a van he believed was loaded with explosives at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., e-mailed an alleged terrorist last year, authorities said…

the sting operation began in June after an undercover agent learned that 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud had been in regular e-mail contact with an “unindicted associate” in Pakistan’s northwest, a frontier region where Al Qaeda and Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are strong.

An FBI document reveals that Mohamud had contact with the suspected terrorist in Aug. 2009. In Dec. 2009, Mohamud discussed the possibility of traveling to Pakistan to engage in violent jihad.

Mohamud wanted “maximum carnage,” kill plenty of children

[….]

Portland – Headquarters for Nation’s AntiWar Movement

Now it is being revealed that the City of Portland was not even aware of the bombing plot until after the Muslim terrorist was arrested.

Five years ago, Portland became the first city in the nation to withdraw from the FBI-led task force.

Adams did not know about the plot to detonate a bomb at the tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square until after Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s arrest Friday night.

Adams, who serves as police commissioner, said he wasn’t aware of the case until 9:15 p.m. Friday when he was called to Portland’s FBI headquarters for a briefing. The mayor said he would have been notified if the bomb threat had been real.

Sanctuary City

A Sanctuary City for all Illegal Aliens

In April 2005, the City Council… voted 4-1 to withdraw its two police officers from the federal task force.

If the Bush administration had guts, it would withdraw all federal homeland security funds from the city immediately. After 9/11, the city refused to cooperate with federal efforts to conduct voluntary interviews of of local Muslims in order to uncover terrorist plots. Portland is also a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. This despite several signs that al Qaeda and pro-Islamists have infiltrated the area.

Jim Wallis has been the subject of some recent blogosphere humor. Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Most folks who receive donations from billionaires tend not to forget them, so pray for Jim Wallis’s memory.” Scholar William Voegeli wondered whether Sojourners “is drowning in money,” since Wallis didn’t remember that megabucks leftist George Soros gave $325,000 to his organization. With Jim’s denial appearing Clintonian, Baylor’s Francis Beckwith imagined Wallis saying, I did not have financial relations with that Soros.

This all grew out of my mention halfway through a July 17 WORLD column that Soros gave money to Sojourners. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Of course, Soros would find the religious left useful in drawing evangelical votes from conservatives and electing candidates who support abortion, same-sex marriage, socialism, and other unbiblical causes. Nor was it surprising that Jim, trying to keep his organization afloat, would take the cash. Yet Jim last month told an interviewer twice, “We don’t receive money from George Soros.”

It’s almost an axiom of politics that denials of evidence raise more questions than the original accusation—if the evidence still exists in one form or another. Other people besides myself had seen grants to Sojourners listed on pages in online reports from Soros’ Open Society Institute. Jay Richards wrote in National Review Online, “I have physical copies of these pages, which is good, because these pages seem to have disappeared from the OSI website (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence).”

The pages had disappeared—an OSI spokeswoman eventually said, “We are overhauling our website”—and that was disappointing, because I wanted people to be able to see for themselves proof of the Soros-Sojourners yoking. What to do? I examined on the Foundation Center website IRS Form 990s filed by Sojourners—but nonprofit groups merely have to list revenue from grants, not spell out their origins.

A stalemate? No, wait—OSI online grant pages were gone, but what about OSI’s Form 990 for 2004? (Grantmakers typically list their donations, and IRS forms cannot be so readily scrubbed, right?) Let’s look—wow, 283 pages, lots of income statements, various reports, no mention of Sojourners. But then . . . Grants to U.S. Public Charities . . . Yes! On page 225: Sojourners, 2401 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009. “To support the Messaging and Mobilization Project: Engaging Christians on the Importance of Civic Involvement.” October 2004: $200,000.

William Lane Craig discusses the book “Four Views of Divine Providence,” to which he defends Molinism. I tend towards the ground between Calvinism and Molinism. Here are some great resources to start delineating where you stand:

The Video That Proves Intelligent Design

Seeing is believing, and they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Over at Creation.com, Brian Thomas has posted a fascinating article entitled, ATP synthase: majestic molecular machine made by a mastermind. ATP synthase is an enzyme that synthesizes an energy-rich compound, ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is used by almost every biochemical process in the body. ATP synthase is also the world’s tiniest rotary motor, and it operates at near 100% efficiency, which is far greater than that of any man-made motor. In his article, Brian Thomas does an excellent job of describing the workings of this enzyme and of exposing the inadequacies of proposed evolutionary explanations for its origin.

Money Quote~Sarfati

You couldn’t have life unless you had this motor to produce the energy currency, so it looks like this motor must have been there right from the beginning

But don’t take my word for it. Have a look at this video by Creation.com, and you’ll see at once that ATP synthase is the product of design. It’ll only take 86 seconds of your valuable time.

You couldn’t have life unless you had this motor to produce the energy currency, so it looks like this motor must have been there right from the beginning, and I’d say that because this motor is so much better, so much tinier and more efficient than anything we can design, … the Designer of the motor is far more intelligent than any motor designer we have today too.

My sentiments exactly. Judge for yourself. You might like to have a look at these links here and here, on Uncommon Descent, where ATP synthase has been highlighted previously, as evidence for Intelligent Design.

I’d like to thank Bornagain77, a regular contributor to Uncommon Descent, for bringing this video to my attention, and also Ashby Camp of True.Origin.